


I Can't Count the Reasons (I should stay)

by pickwicklingpapers



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Alternate Universe, Secret Santa, Thanks Adele, dana scully is bae
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-25
Updated: 2015-12-25
Packaged: 2018-05-09 08:51:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5533700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pickwicklingpapers/pseuds/pickwicklingpapers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>scully would say that everything has a beginning a middle and an end, as clear as a story. he'd say that the universe is a circle and wonder when she became his sky. </p><p>five ways fox mulder met dana scully</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Can't Count the Reasons (I should stay)

**Author's Note:**

> this was not what i was supposed to be writing but then i did. secret santa for modernlovehermione over on tumblr. merry christmas!

i. He's at the bar because it's the seediest place he knows. She's there because she knows that's where they'll never think to find her. 

Their eyes meet across the bar as she’s being hit on by yet another wasted old man. It’s Christmas eve and even if it weren’t, she still wouldn’t be bothered. He raises his glass in the old age tradition – _I know you hate this and so do I but look we’re both still here and hey, how’s the vodka?_ – He gets a wry smile in return and considers it a success. The old man seems to finally get the message when she punches him in the balls and backs away. Three drinks later and they’ve slid across to each other. It might be the unspoken connection, but it could be the bowl of peanuts that the bar tender placed out inbetween them. Who knows.

He’s drunk because aliens. She’s drunk because boyfriends who are old enough to be her father. They get to talking.

He tells her that he’s with the FBI. She laughs and says that they offered her a place straight out of med school. She’s a doctor, she informs him, slurring slightly. She seems very keen that everybody know she has a medical degree. He supposes that he’d be just as proud if he had one too. She says that she chose not to go to Quantico because of her boyfriend – a married man with a daughter roughly her age. She says her parents hate her now. They’re religious like that, and her dad’s a navy captain so it was never going to end well. She doesn’t know whether or not she regrets the decision. Sure, the guy loves her but she doesn’t quite know if she loves him yet. Can you ever really love someone? Now he wants to get married so she escaped to this bar because she just feels so unfulfilled.

In return he tells her about his sister. About Samantha and her favourite food and her favourite tv show and how he was so mean to her the night she was taken. He tells her it was aliens and that’s what he does at the FBI; he hunts aliens but all he ever finds is shadow governments and dead ends. She laughs, says she wouldn’t be surprised if the two were linked but that, really, he needs to start looking at actual evidence, at science, and draws a small ufo on the napkin in front of her. He draws a little speech bubble coming from the cockpit that says _help me scully the aliens have me help help_. They laugh and the pen splotches so they start all over again.

In the end they play darts with peanuts and a napkin with a bad drawing of the world on because even when they don’t know each other, they end up being each other’s universe.

\--

ii. In this universe, Teena Mulder isn't murdered by the consortium. 

Fox Mulder never had a Dana Scully so those threads never got strung out and the tapestry never got unravelled scene by scene. 

This time round, Dana Scully couldn't bare disappointing her father so she stayed in hospitals and took residencies and became more qualified than any doctor had the right to be. She always felt most at home with the children but she feels like she's toxic to them and she can't stand it when they die so she moved to oncology. And if she wasn't simpering sweet, if her bedside manner sometimes left things to be desired, maybe it was because Dana Scully always felt like she was meant for more. 

Teena Mulder lies, desiccated by cancer, on a hospital bed. It's a top hospital because the Mulders have money, but even the best hospitals can't vanquish the smell of death and so Fox Mulder spends as little time there as possible because he has aliens to catch. He's numb. He doesn't have anyone to pull him back from the brink, though, no one to remind him that family is the only thing you are born with and the only thing you leave the world with, and so he drifts away from his dying mother. 

He never quite forgave her for his childhood anyway. 

It's not a government brand of cancer this time, because Mulder hasn't pulled enough strings or gotten close enough for that to be necessary. Without Scully, there isn’t that drive, that logic, that passion. It's just the everyday cycle of birth and growth spinning uncontrollably through his mother's body, replicating illness on a cellular level. 

But the best hospitals have the best doctors, even if they are tired and grumpy and longing for excitement, however little they won't admit it. That's why it's a small ginger-haired woman who signs off on his mother's treatments, who stands in corners and takes notes silently _because she is here to treat patients not waste time making idle chit chat goddamnit._

They both come at odd times and neither of them likes to talk so it's no surprise to anyone really that they mostly always miss each other and, when Teena Mulder inevitably moves on to the next world, they forget each other like ships that pass in the night except with more water between them. 

\--

iii. Maybe Dana Scully never left Quantico. Maybe she never found her way to a basement with a mountain of dust and pencils stuck in the ceiling. Let's say that she stays as a teacher because she's found that, actually, teaching's what she loves to do. Let's imagine that she stays happy and single before meeting a guy and having two, no, three children and living that apple pie life she always secretly dreamed of. She doesn't give up her work though. Dana Scully would never marry someone who requires her to give up her work. Dana Scully doesn't do compromises. Maybe Melissa dies in a hit and run instead. Where there is death there will always be death, but at least this time Dana Scully doesn't think that it's her fault. Who knows, perhaps she even does the autopsies that the bureau send over. Even in this life, Dana Scully loves slapping on the latex. 

Fox Mulder stays in his basement and is gradually forgotten by everyone except assistant director Skinner who regularly shouts at him for wasting FBI time. Spooky Mulder, FBI's most unwanted, becomes a popular legend in the halls of the academy. Maybe Dana Scully hears it. Perhaps she connects the man to the autopsies, but whatever – they’re just odd, dead bodies to her. Just cafeteria gossip and tall tales for cocktail parties. 

He tries his hardest but there's only so much one man can do and there's no one there to keep him from looking too far into the sky. So he misses the science and the clues and the things that would make people believe, following the universe's light show instead.  

Mulder runs and he runs and he fights for the truth and he fights the future but there's only so much fighting one man can do before he takes a hit. 

 They took his sister when he was young and once his mother is gone there is no one, there is nothing that they can use against him. 

Fox Mulder pushed the door too far open. He pulled the wrongs leads and let the threads unravel a little too far. He might not know about the bees but he knows about the aliens and that is dangerous enough. Fox Mulder is a problem and problems must be dealt with. It's a philosophy that not even the cigarette smoking man can argue against and so, finally, they must take action. 

Fox William Mulder dies one cold January morning and isn't found until someone comes looking for files in the basement and notices a large pile of dust. It's another couple of days until someone bothers to check his apartment and by then it's starting to smell. 

It looks like a suicide so it's treated like a suicide because there’s no one there to kick up a fuss. Three strange men attend the funeral that the FBI puts on but other than that, no one seems to care. Mulder doesn't have friends, especially not at work. He slips away even more quietly than he lived his life and no one, _no one_ , thinks to care. Assistant director Skinner is secretly glad to be rid of the extra paperwork. 

And not once in his short life and his even shorter career did Mulder spare a thought for the D. Scully that signed off on his autopsy reports. 

 

\--

iv. Despite a lack of Dana Scully, Mulder still ends up working with Tom Colton. 

Dana Scully, in this case, joined the FBI as a mild mannered assistant, constantly up to her ears in paperwork. This time round, she dates Colton because he is respectable and Dana Scully has always had a severe sense of duty. Maybe this time she cares just a little bit more about what her parents think. Perhaps she's a little bit weaker on the inside, if Dana Scully could ever really be weak. 

But in any universe, Tom Colton is a dick. By the time she realises this, it's already too late. 

He's classical and perfect and just the type of man that middle class parents love. He's up and coming at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He's rich. He's moderately handsome. He’s from a good family. Bill jr. loves him. Perhaps they meet when Dana's just that little bit younger, part way through med school. So eager to please and just the right mentality for him to sink his teeth into because her family think he is an angel.  

When Fox Mulder meets Dana Scully, she's just a little thing tucked into Colton's side. They're at an FBI gathering - party isn't really the appropriate word - and Colton's been with her for six, seven years, working down her self esteem every day. It’s a shame, he thinks, because she could be so, so much more. She could be magnificent.

When Fox Mulder looks at Dana Scully, he sees a delicate, unhappy little thing who doesn't quite know how to flap wings and break free so she quietly fades into the background instead. She's beautiful like a hummingbird, but so exotic that he thinks of her only as a creature at the zoo. She's so obviously straining at the glass, desperate to leave if only she could find out how. She'll damage herself before too long. 

The other Fox Mulder, the one that has a Dana Scully to keep him on the straight and narrow, he'd help. He'd get her away from Colton with a line about aliens and how they're grey not green (what would he know, he's colourblind) and they'd solve crimes together. But this Fox Mulder just takes another drink because he drinks entirely too much nowadays. He has no hope, no logic, no science to give him the proof of that he so desperately needs. 

He sits in his basement and rots whilst she flutters in her tall glass tower. 

\--

v. Instead, she walks into his office on that first day like fire with a core of ice. She never obeyed her family's wishes or became the quiet housewife of Colton because that isn't Dana Scully, not really. She's a quiet whirlwind and she doesn't give a single fuck what people think of her. 

He wonders what happened to make her that way. 

She's not put off by his little speech about being the FBI's most unwanted, and calmly destroys his questions of aliens with logic and scientific fact. He can't help but feel impressed by the little girl who looks like a porcelain doll but who rewrote Einstein and defends science with a passion. He looks for answers in the stars but she wants logic and proof and solid evidence. 

 There's a high chance that she's in the wrong department for that, but after weeks and months and years of abductions and mutilations and tall tales he realises that he's fallen more than a little bit in love. He wonders where he can find proof of that. Scully would say that everything has a beginning a middle and an end, as clear as a story. He'd say that the universe is a circle and wonder when she became his sky. 

Again and again he nearly loses her but he never quite manages it. She loses a lot though. Her beliefs. Her sister. Her son. Her family's trust and respect and as much as it means to her it means more to him because he knows that he's the one she did it all for.  

Sometimes he sits and thinks about how they began. About conspiracies and shadow governments and children and cancer. Thinks about a film that destroyed any credibility they could ever have had. About the time she spent searching for him but still never admitted the truth. Thinks about the small flame that walked into his office like she owned it and proceeded to make it all hers hers hers. Even he's hers now. Thinks back to that simpler time and thinks

 

 _how did it come to this_  

 


End file.
